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Friday, 27 February 2015

Mysterious Bright Spots Shine on Dwarf Planet Ceres

An image of Ceres taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows that
the brightest spot on the dwarf planet has a dimmer companion.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

By Mike Wall | SPACE.com

SPACE.com/NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
- Two photos of the dwarf planet Ceres taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft
on Feb. 12, 2015, from a distance of about 52,000 miles (83,000
kilometers).

NASA's
Dawn spacecraft will have plenty of mysteries to investigate when it
begins orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres next month, as the probe's latest
photos attest.

Dawn's most recent images of Ceres,
taken Feb. 12 at a distance of 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) away,
show an abundance of craters on the dwarf planet, as well as numerous
bright spots that have scientists baffled.

"As we slowly approach the stage,
our eyes transfixed on Ceres and her planetary dance, we find she has
beguiled us but left us none the wiser," Dawn principal investigator
Chris Russell of UCLA said in a statement. "We expected to be surprised; we did not expect to be this puzzled."

The new photos, which have a resolution of 4.9 miles (7.8 km) per
pixel, are the sharpest ever taken of Ceres, NASA officials said.

"We can confirm that it is something on Ceres that reflects more
sunlight, but what that is remains a mystery," Dawn mission director and
chief engineer Marc Rayman, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California, told Space.com via email at the time

Dawn could clear up the mystery soon. The probe is scheduled to enter
orbit around the 590-mile-wide (950 km) Ceres, the largest body in the
main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, on the night of March 5.
Dawn will start studying Ceres in earnest six weeks after that; the
probe is scheduled to work its way down to its first science orbit on
April 23.

The $466 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 to study the
asteroid belt's two biggest denizens — the protoplanet Vesta, which is
330 miles (530 km) wide, and Ceres. Dawn orbited Vesta from July 2011
through September 2012, when it departed for Ceres.

Dawn's observations of these two planetary building blocks should
help scientists better understand the solar system's early days, NASA
officials said.

Dawn is scheduled to study Ceres from a variety of orbits through June 2016, when the probe's mission will come to an end.

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Things in space are certainly getting interesting and I wonder whether this is volcanic or possibly electromagnetically generated phenomena similar to Transient Lunar Phenomena?